1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the area of performance and workload management within a Workflow-Management-System (WFMS).
2. Description and Disadvantages of Prior Art
A new area of technology with increasing importance is the domain of Workflow-Management-Systems (WFMS). WFMS support the modeling and execution of business processes. Business processes executed within a WFMS environment control which piece of work of a network of pieces of work will be performed by whom and which resources are exploited for this work. The individual pieces of work might be distributed across a multitude of different computer systems connected by some type of network. A thorough representation of WFMS technology is given by Frank Leymann, Dieter Roller, Production Workflow: Concepts and Techniques, Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, N.J., 1999.
The product “IBM MQSeries Workflow” represents such a typical modern, sophisticated, and powerful workflow management system. It supports the modeling of business processes as a network of activities. This network of activities, the process model, is constructed as a directed, acyclic, weighted, colored graph. The nodes of the graph represent the activities which are performed. The edges of the graph, the control connectors, describe the potential sequence of execution of the activities. Definition of the process graph is via the IBM MQSeries Flow Definition Language (FDL) or the built-in graphical editor. The runtime component of the workflow manager interprets the process graph and distributes the execution of activities to the right person at the right place, e.g. by assigning tasks to a work list according to the respective person, wherein said work list is stored as digital data within said workflow or process management computer system.
Business processes quite often consist of parts that are time critical, others are not. In particular time critical maybe those parts of a process that are carried out automatically; that means without any user intervention.
One method that has been proposed to control the processing behavior of a set of activities in terms of workload balancing is via the support of a workload management system (WLMS). Even if the WFMS may exploit the support of a WLMS to achieve its processing targets this is limited to certain processing environments only as only highly sophisticated operating systems like IBM's MVS system do provide this type of technology. Especially within a heterogeneous distributed processing environment, in which WFMS do operate, WLM-technology is missing on most of the involved systems. A more advanced approach that has been proposed allows to specify execution priorities for individual activities, for a set of activities, or for the complete process model of a business process. But this approach has the significant disadvantage that each instantiation of such a process model is executed by the WFMS with identical execution priority characteristics. This teaching does not allow to differentiate between process instances whose processing is more important than another one.